Rushdie Non Grata

The Jaipur Literary Festival, a giddily chaotic celebration of the written word set on the grounds of a Rajasthan palace, ended in misery and embarrassment today, with the organizers bowing to pressure from local security forces and scotching plans for Salman Rushdie to “appear” at the festival, finally, by video link. Rushdie had already been forced to cancel plans to come to Jaipur after he had received intelligence reports—bogus intelligence, as it turned out—that everyone from “paid assassins from the Mumbai underworld” to radical Muslim clerics were sitting in malevolent wait.

Rushdie’s video image was not allowed at the Festival, but he was on television tonight in India, being interviewed on NDTV, and he spoke out angrily about the “unscrupulous” Muslim groups that threatened him, and an Indian government that failed to act. Speaking from London, Rushdie called the whole affair “fantastically fishy” and blamed the ruling Congress Party and other officials for bowing to electoral priorities and ignoring the priorities of freedom of expression.

Rushdie pointed out that his work is freely distributed in many Muslim countries, including Egypt, Turkey, and, now, Libya. “Does India want to be a totalitarian country like China?” Rushdie asked in his NDTV interview. If censorship continues, he went on, “India will cease to be a free country.” He added that this was just “one incident” in a larger trend of sectarian politics that has been displacing secular India over the past thirty years.

The shameful episode in Jaipur is, indeed, best seen in light of deeper, and troubling, tendencies of contemporary Indian politics. The country is Hindu majority, but the government seems eager to court the huge Muslim populace at election time, no matter how troubling the demands. One famous and trendsetting example: in 1978, a Muslim woman named Shah Bano was divorced from her husband. Shah Bano had no means to support herself and her five children, and she appealed to the civil courts to get alimony; after seven years she succeeded in winning a judgment from the Supreme Court. But then, under heavy pressure from Muslim groups and clerics, the government of Rajiv Gandhi reversed the Court’s judgment and passed the Muslim Women’s Bill, which decreased the authority of civil authority. That move, ceding greater power to religious authorities, was widely seen as a purely political attempt by Gandhi to win Muslim political support. Civil liberties groups and Hindu factions were enraged.

Then, in October, 1988, India, the world’s largest democracy, ordered “The Satanic Verses” banned. It’s worth remembering that it did so four months before the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa calling for the execution of Salman Rushdie. The Iranian fatwa was lifted (though no one should have any illusions about the lingering danger) after a decade of wretched hiding, slanders, and violence directed against his translators; the ban on “The Satanic Verses” in India remains in place.

The same fear of clerical protest animates the current Indian government, which is far more interested in retaining power than in freedom of expression, much less making life pleasant for Salman Rushdie and his readers. The Congress Party is trying to win Muslim votes in elections in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh next month, and so “even minor fulminations” by regional imams “make the local leaders squirm,” according to an article this week in the liberal magazine Outlook. The Rushdie affair in Jaipur is a pawn in this larger political game. Railing against a banned book that few here have managed to obtain and read is an easy way to stir up populist fervor. Various preachers and extremist politicians latched onto the Jaipur festival as an issue and directed full-throated attacks at Rushdie; old stuff, but it was enough.

The organizers in Jaipur, no matter how earnest and devoted to literature and free speech, seemed no match for the complicated forces in play. From the start, they seemed blindsided, backed into corners, and constantly backpedalling. By the time the owner of the Diggi Palace, on the festival grounds, declared he would not put his property at risk, and the organizers said they had no choice but to stand down and cancel the video-link, everyone seemed ready to go home.

But there was a footnote: after the grim announcements, a group of Indian liberal intellectuals—including the editor of the left-leaning magazine Tehelka, a Bengali poet, and a Bollywood actor—got onstage to discuss what had just happened. They solemnly reminded the crowd that the Indian constitution said that censorship is permitted in order to preserve public order. They all said, though, that the maintenance of public order had been exploited repeatedly for political reasons.

Censorship has been a constant theme since the banning of the “The Satanic Verses” nearly a quarter century ago. The government, spurred by Hindu and Muslim groups and clerics, rushes in to preserve “order” by decreeing, or tolerating, the suppression of free expression. M. F. Husain, a Muslim painter known as “the Picasso of India,” who died last year in exile, faced a constant onslaught of death threats and lawsuits in India because he dared to paint Hindu goddesses in the nude and in suggestive poses. The Bangladeshi-born novelist and feminist Taslima Nasreen has been attacked and threatened repeatedly by Islamists for her book “Lajja,” or “Shame,” about a Hindu family threatened by Muslims. (Nasreen has had to live in Sweden and the United States for years at a time.) Only months ago, Joseph Lelyveld, the former Times executive editor, watched from afar as his new book on Gandhi, “Great Soul,” was banned in the state of Gujarat as “perverse in nature.” The local authorities got the idea from tabloid reports in England that Lelyveld claimed that Gandhi was gay or bisexual; he makes no such claim. The book remains banned. (Lelyveld, a former India correspondent for the Times, attended the festival.)

Hari Kunzru, one of four writers to read passages from “The Satanic Verses” as a protest against the treatment of Rushdie, said, “We wanted to demystify the book. It is, after all, just a book. Not a bomb. Not a knife or a gun. Just a book.” Kunzru read an excerpt about the theme of doubt and certainty. It had no religious content at all, as it happened, but, still, the organizers were frantic and fielding calls from clerics, politicians, and even the chief minister of Rajasthan. Under advice from the organizers, all four writers made an early exit from Jaipur, and Kunzru, writing in the Guardian this morning—the piece was reprinted in the Hindustan Times—said he was told that he and the others were risking arrest. Kunzru was out of India by Saturday evening.

One member of the Indian parliament, Asaduddin Owaisi, of Hyderabad, accused Kunzru of “Islam-bashing under the guise of liberalism.” In his Guardian piece, Kunzru stood up for free speech but responded to the likes of Owaisi in a tone of conciliation: “I would like to reiterate that in taking this action I believed (and continue to believe) that I was not breaking the law, and had no interest in causing gratuitous offense. I apologize unreservedly to anyone who feels I have disrespected his or her faith.”

Rushdie vowed he would visit India soon, and he would keep on coming. “Deal with it,” he said.

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